This chapter provides the tools to compute catastrophe (CAT) risk, which represents a compound measure of the likelihood and magnitude of adverse consequences affecting structures, individuals, and valuable assets. The process consists of first establishing an inventory of assets (here real or simulated) exposed to potential hazards (exposure module). Estimating the expected damage resulting from a given hazard load (according to Chapter 2) is the second crucial step in the assessment process (vulnerability module). The application of damage functions to exposure data forms the basis for calculating loss estimates (loss module). To ensure consistency across perils, the mean damage ratio is used as the main measure for damage footprints D(x,y), with the final loss footprints simply expressed as L(x,y) = D(x,y) × ν(x,y), where ν(x,y) represents the exposure footprint. Damage functions are provided for various hazard loads: blasts (explosions and asteroid impacts), earthquakes, floods, hail, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and wind.

This chapter goes beyond the description of individual events by covering extremes caused by a combination of multiple events. Two main types of interactions are covered: domino effects and compound events. Domino effects, which represent one-way chains of events, are quantified using Markov theory and graph theory. Compound events, which include complex feedback loops in the complex Earth system, are modelled with system dynamics (as in Chapter 4). Two such systems are provided, the ESCIMO climate model and the World2 model of world dynamics. The impact of global warming, pollution, and resource depletion on catastrophes is investigated, as far as ecosystem and societal collapse. The types of catastrophes considered in this chapter are as follows: storm clustering, earthquake clustering (with accelerated fatigue of structures), domino effects at refineries (explosions, fires, toxic spills), cascading failures in physical networks (more precisely blackouts in a power grid), rainforest dieback, lake eutrophication, and hypothetical human population collapse.

This introductory chapter, encyclopaedic in nature, covers the main aspects of catastrophe (CAT) risk from a qualitative perspective, offering an overview of what will be explored in quantitative terms in the subsequent chapters. It starts with the definition of the fundamental terms and concepts, such as peril, hazard, risk, uncertainty, probability, and CAT model. It then describes the historical development of catastrophe risk science, which was often influenced by the societal impact of some infamous catastrophes. The main periods are as follows: from ancient myths to medieval texts, mathematization (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and computerization (twentieth century). Finally, it provides an exhaustive list of perils categorized by their physical origin, including geophysical, hydrological, meteorological, climatological, biological, extraterrestrial, technological, and socio-economic perils. In total, 42 perils are covered, with historical examples and consequences for people and structures discussed for each one of them.

This chapter provides the tools necessary to implement virtually any type of peril in the hazard module of a catastrophe (CAT) model. These tools comprise, for a given peril, the creation of the following: a set of simulated events, a catalogue of hazard intensity footprints, and the main metrics employed in probabilistic hazard assessment (hazard curves and hazard maps). Despite the general purpose of the standard CAT modelling framework, peril-specific CAT models are commonly developed in silos by dedicated experts. In view of the dozens of perils quantified in this textbook, a more generalist approach is employed. An ontology is proposed that harmonizes the description of different perils, going from (1) event source, to (2) event size distribution, to, finally, (3) event intensity footprint. To illustrate how all the previous steps can be wrapped up in one continuous modelling pipeline, an application to probabilistic seismic hazard assessment is also provided.

Cornel West describes his experience with Chekhov; emphasizes Chekhov’s philosophical and artistic significance as a tragicomic thinker whose understanding of the catastrophic bears affinities with the American Blues tradition while also being foreign (though necessary) to mainstream American culture.

As I indicated in the Introduction, I will begin my tour of four select security referents at the macro level and work my way down. I will do so for four reasons. The first is to help shake off any lingering anthropocentric biases that might skew the analysis were we to work in the opposite direction. Human security, of course, naturally invites an anthropocentric treatment; culture as I shall be discussing it is also largely a human concern; and the state is a human creation. Were we to get into the habit of putting people at the centre of our analysis, we might do so too readily precisely where it would be least appropriate. The second is that ecospheric security will be the least familiar concept of the four and for that reason might risk coming across as an afterthought if I were to treat it last. Third, and relatedly, given the unfamiliar style of analysis to which I aim to subject these referents, I see advantages in giving it its first rigorous test in a context in which it is least likely to grate, hoping thereby to cultivate a degree of comfort with it once I turn to referents that we are used to analyzing in less unconventional ways. Fourth, and most importantly, I will argue that the ecosphere must take priority as a security referent, and accordingly must condition our understanding of the others. This argument would be more difficult to make were I to put various carts before the horse.

Although English settler colonialism was ascendant in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americas, its literature was often written as disaster. This chapter considers three modes of catastrophe – accident, disaster, and trauma – to argue that the violent forces and harsh conditions of life in the New World fragmented former identities and that coloniality emerged from that shattering. The story of accident is told through Jamaican creole Jonathan Dickinson who, along with his small crew of family, friends, shipmen, servants, and slaves, were shipwrecked en route from Port Royal to Philadelphia in 1696. They landed in Florida, where their accidental arrival led them to impersonate the Spanish, to provoke enmities with Indigenous people over both their feigned and their real identities, and to desperately improvise their way over 230 miles to rescue. The story of disaster is told through early Jamestown, a site where extreme suffering and violence compounded to guarantee dire outcomes. For the small number of settlers who survived, their Englishness did not survive within them. From the Starving Time to the First Anglo-Powhatan War, their coloniality took shape in a space of abjection and aggression, marking settlement as a theater of brutality and horror. Trauma is recounted through the narrative of the Pequot War and the life of Mary Prince. These stories of unbridled warfare against the Pequot of New England and the un/common trauma inflicted on enslaved people of the Caribbean bear testimony to the radical dispossession white colonials inflicted upon Native and enslaved people, and the struggle to maintain identities in this context. Together, attention to accident, disaster, and trauma ruptures any smooth accounting of colonial “development” and instead testifies to the tearing, sundering, and shattering that make this history remain uneven, unsteady, and unresolved.

Heather Houser considers the conceptual frameworks of a topic that bears on nearly every other chapter in this Companion, contemporary “cli-fi” and ecocritical approaches to current literature. When writers presume transformational climate change as a starting point, rather than an abstract possibility, they narrate an “uncanny valley of familiarity and radical alteration” that extends, accelerates, or alters the logics of the present into near or distant futures of drought, warfare, destitution, and superstorms.

Arguing that literature requires alternatives to genres such as cli-fi – that focus on the ‘after’, the catastrophe, rather than causes or solutions – this chapter examines Palestinian literature. It draws on Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun (1962) to narrate a tradition of writing that has emerged from interconnected processes of resource extraction, colonialism and fossil capital; and, historically, from the nakba (‘catastrophe’) – the displacement or ethnic cleansing of 70,000 Palestinians in 1948 – and enforced migration to, for example, an unbearably hot Iraq. He notes that a twentieth-century literary tradition – of poets (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Marwan Darwish) and novelists (Susan Abulhawa, Liyana Badr) – both recalls a fecund Palestine, pre-oil, and resists the forces and interests of the fossil economy. With the experience of displacement and environmental devastation increasingly globalised, the enduring resistance that characterises Palestinian literature can be an exemplar for literature not as resignation but as resistance to the accelerating, imperialising forces underlying the Capitalocene.

The recent renewed reflection on the role of catastrophe in literature and culture has received special attention from scholars in the environmental humanities. In particular, the connection between catastrophe and violence came into focus more prominently in an effort to understand how catastrophes have been framed rhetorically and culturally. This chapter shows how the theatre functions as a laboratory for exploring the Anthropocene by way of a reading of a German Expressionist play that focuses on the connection among catastrophe, violence and the negotiation of environmental risks. It also considers how these consequences and risk assessments might be perceived from a culturally decentred position by focusing on a unique conversation that took place in the 1990s between the German tradition of political theatre and its redaction by an Aboriginal Australian playwright, suggesting the continued need for a post-colonial critique of the concept of the Anthropocene.

Drawing attention to the Anthropocene as both proposed geological epoch and discourse about the Earth’s future, the Introduction examines the Anthropocene’s challenge to the value of literature and literary criticism and the opportunity it offers to reinvigorate both. It works from and summarises the chapters in the book while highlighting arguments and perspectives from Anthropocene studies in literature and environmental humanities. Citing diverse writers, it argues that literature can deploy its unique practices (narrative, poetics, etc.) and faculty for imagining the future towards an understanding of humans’ interconnection with the Earth that the Anthropocene demands; and that it can best do so by adapting and evolving those practices towards sharing divergent experiences (e.g. stories of people and species disseminated online) and, via (say) experimental poetry or elongated narrative, relating human beings to exponentially vaster scales: deep history, Earth, the distant future. The Introduction concludes with a case study of Chile which underlines literature's and culture’s value in mediating the complex social, cultural and ontological questions that the Anthropocene poses.

Romantic nature writing emerges at roughly the same time as the industrial innovations that will eventually lead to global carbon capitalism and therefore is for some scholars coeval with the birth of the Anthropocene. This chapter takes a genealogical approach to the Anthropocene by suggesting that there are significant continuities between Romantic literature and contemporary discourses on environmental catastrophe. Focusing on two case studies – William Cowper’s The Task and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both of which responded to climate change caused by volcanic eruptions – this chapter shows how Romantic writers address what it means to be alive at a catastrophic turning point in planetary history. They are concerned with the power of the human imagination to shape its environments, yet also with our vulnerability to elemental forces that we may affect but that we cannot control.